Is it only the person in charge that sees the whole picture?

It’s election time in the USA. This morning, the state of New Mexico (where I am at the moment) heard that its Democrat Governor was making way for a Republican. Some of the officials I’ve been meeting this week aren’t too sure if they’re going to have a job once the new Governor settles in. The extent of political appointees for executive functions is much greater here than in the UK.

As far as ensuring that government agencies work successfully together, my impression is that this isn’t exactly a recipe for success. I’ve heard the same story a couple of times from my interviewees who are involved with State government, or indeed with New York City.

A very senior leader, maybe a Commissioner or Special Advisor, is appointed by the Governor or Mayor or First Lady. They’re an enthusiast for collaboration, and they set up a structure whereby they force agencies to start coming together. In addition, the Governor or Mayor makes a point of challenging their commissioners at Cabinet level over how successfully they’re working in collaboration. They even get agreement on a set of data that shows the extent to which the City or the State is achieving a particular outcome, and they use this to further challenge what is really going on, and collaboration improves. Further down the food chain, key officials work out technical compromises between departments.

(One of the ones I like, which is a good example, is where those planning prisoner discharge in New York City were very reluctant to let the Child Support Agency people near their ex prisoners. They didn’t want to ‘give up’ their convicts to child support, thereby leaving the ex prisoners with even more debt on leaving prison. But the Commissioner saw a win-win, so persuaded Child Support to offer very gentle repayment schedules to the former prisoners. The key officials made sure this worked in practice, and that the discharge planners were bought in to the process.)

So, this is all well and good. What does collaboration need? Strong leadership. A commitment to working collaboratively. Creativity in the face of conflict. Holding people’s feet to the fire.

But then the collaboration enthusiast moves on. Maybe, like in the State of Virginia, the Governor’s term of office is only limited to one term of four years. Or maybe the leader gets to thinking, I’ve been doing this for 6 or 10 years, and I need a change.

What then? In one place I visited, they were clear this had been really problematic. “Performance, and the collaboration, went on a plateau.” Another said, “We did stick with it, even without the leadership. We’ve had regional roundtables. But it’s easy to forget, easy to get in to silo’s again.”

That left me thinking, there has to be a way to sustain the desire to collaborate. It has to be more than just strong leadership that makes this happen. How do you embed it into a culture?

The first clue I got to how to answer this came in my visit to the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New Haven, Connecticut. They talked about a collaboration that had been going for 15 years, trying to prevent homelessness in ex-offenders. A key success factor had been having a number of actors who ‘saw from the whole’, who weren’t just the key commissioners of service. For them, it was what they calle

d the OPM. I think this is the Office of Policy and Management, and it seemed to perform a similar function to the UK's treasury, in that it co-ordinated budgeting. It therefore incentivised agencies to co-operate through funding structures. They also had an independent, non-profit agency, the CSH themselves, sitting on the collaborative and looking at the big picture.

Aha, I thought. So along with the convening power of the leader in those earlier examples, what the leader is doing is ‘seeing from the whole’. And to try and embed that in to your culture, you can ensure that its in other actors’ job descriptions that they have to ‘see from the whole’ as well.

I then started wondering about the holy grail. Would it be possible to have the whole system seeing from the part and the whole at the same time?

In the UK Border Agency, my caseworkers would often be asked to do several things at once. They’d need to conclude a case quickly, and needed to make sure that the ‘control’ aspects were suitably attended to - background checks, following up intelligence, etc. As far as possible we tried to prevent putting productivity and control in conflict with each other. But it isn’t always easy. I popped in on the UK's visa office in New York when I was there, and this was definitely a live issue. Of course it’s easier to set a target for turnaround times than it is to set a target for preventing undesirable people coming to the UK. So sometimes the system can get a bit biased in favour of the simple metric rather than seeing ‘the whole’.

How do you do get every actor, including frontline staff, to see from the part and the whole, I wondered to myself?

Service Canada’s answer was to put service and the citizen at the heart of their junior staff’s work, rather than just administration. They re-trained over 5000 staff, re-classified their profession as service rather than administration, changed the competencies that they were promoting people on, and had a massive engagement and communication effort on the part of senior managers, ensuring that the vision of being service oriented was embedded.

I saw another fascinating example in the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, which has a constellation approach to organising non-profit groups when doing joint advocacy. Tonya Surman turned the idea of who's in the lead, completely on its head, and deliberately set up a structure to honour 'chaos and complexity'. Her guiding principles were to 'break rules', 'be provocative' and 'have fun'. (The picture below is of one floor in the Centre for Social Innovation, a place where lots of different organisations can rent a hot desk, or an office, and work from the same shared space.)

In her model, there would be one 'magnetic attractor' - an issue that pulled lot

s of different organisations and people towards it. (In Tonya's case, this was toxicity and children's health). Those that were attracted would be in the 'ecosystem'. You couldn't choose who was in that ecosystem, or who your partners were, it was simply whoever was interested - so it might include the producers of the toxins as well as those campaigning against them. Then self-organising action teams would coalesce around sub-themes. In Tonya's case they'd had an action team on 'mercury', one on 'education' and one on 'policy', and others too. From each self-organising action team, there would be a representative on a stewardship council. The stewardship council was deliberately charged with 'looking after the ecosystem'. So people who served on it would have their own partial view of their action team AND be charged with looking at things from the whole. There was a secretariat for the stewardship council but this was deliberately in a third party and was not attached to any organisation in the ecosystem. The Secretariat's role was to incubate and support the stewardship group. You can read a lot more about this model in Tonya's article.

So, my mind spun with whether you could apply this to a government collaboration. The attraction? All the people who are interested in a theme self-organise. There is a significant group of people who are charged with 'looking after the ecosystem', and they are not all the people with power or money, they're just the people that care the most and have the expertise. Those people are spread liberally around the ecosystem. The downside? As government, you'd be highly reluctant to 'let go of the power' and let the self-organising principle do its stuff. What if they didn't focus on the minister's (aka the public's) priorities? What if you had to work with people that you really didn't want to work with, who were angry and undermining?

But what a lot of food for thought!